Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Humbled by the Word

The Master. What educated person could live without his factional fiction? Borges created a genre which itself is now a fact in Western culture. And that fact, inadequately but accurately put, is that words lie. They can lie beautifully and even beneficially, but they nevertheless lie. And we love them for it.

Words cannot reveal but oh how they direct one’s attention, often to opposing points of the compass. Words do not cut the world at its joints but separate off bits of reality arbitrarily with bloody and ragged edges that look different from every angle. Words then hide their duplicity behind a facade of neutrality and objectivity. Their beauty distracts us so we hardly notice the flesh behind the masque.

Words lurk. They wait patiently, sometimes over millennia, for the unwary reader, whom they invade without conscience. Every use of a word is a Trojan horse meant to surreptitiously further someone's agenda: to convince, to inform, to threaten, to attract, to mislead, to embarrass, but never merely to designate reality accurately or completely.

It is only when we think that we control words, when we think that we know with some certainty what they really, really mean, that they become dangerous. Speaking and writing words do not control them but spread them like a virus coughed into a crowd. Philosophers know that words speak people as much as that people speak words. Words, texts, essays, books, libraries are as controllable as an atomic explosion, and spread even more fallout.

So humility is the prime virtue of the writer who knows he is controlled by every word he uses. He revels publicly in his literal humiliation by the words he publishes. He tells the truth by letting us know he lies with his words. He humbles himself before his words in order to become their master. He is more clever than words because they don't know how to be humble. Their hubris is their vulnerability.

This is why Jorge Luis Borges may be the humblest writer ever to exist.

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